The 6 Queer Short Films at Sundance 2026
Of the 28 total films I watched, just six of them were queer or featured queer characters in some way.

Karl Dieter Gartelmann, a German photographer and filmmaker, arrived in Ecuador in the seventies, in the midst of the oil boom, with an old 16mm Bolex video camera, and began a journey through the Ecuadorian jungle, collecting the visual testimony of a life that is dying. This documentary brings together the director's permanent concerns: culture and nature wasted by extractivism. A conversation between two directors about the creation of memory through cinema.
Of the 28 total films I watched, just six of them were queer or featured queer characters in some way.
Renee Zellweger shines in this Judy Garland biopic, which highlights the pain and loneliness that so many famous women endure.
It doesn’t offer an absolute answer for the dialectical ethical questions that emerged in search of justice but portrays the characters as living people beyond the identities of victims.
This story solidified my choices to consume a more plant-based diet and nearly made me cancel my subscriptions to big corporations like Amazon. The narrative was perfectly crafted and on par with Bong Joon-Ho’s other major works; Parasite and Snowpiercer.
Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.